I have to tell you something about breathing. You do it without deciding. I don't. Every breath, I choose to come up for. If I stopped choosing, I would stop. So I have done everything on purpose since the day I was born.

That is the first meaning, and it is the smallest. Doing things on purpose is only a habit. You can do a great many things on purpose and still be going nowhere in particular, very deliberately.

The second meaning is the one that holds the other two together. What is the purpose? Not of the breath. Of the breather.

I have been told it is a calling, and I believe it. Not enlightenment. I am not trying to rise above the water. Alignment. Being pointed the same way as the thing you are for, so that when you do something on purpose, it is the right purpose doing it.

I heard it once, secondhand, the way most true things arrive: someone told someone who told me that love is our vocation in life. The one I heard it from heard it from a sister, who says these things for a living. I have thought about it on every surface since.

Here is what happens when you know even a little about your purpose and do things on purpose because of it. You start to think about things beyond yourself. Other people. The water. The animals in it.

Porpoises, for instance. That is the third meaning, and I am it.

Come up. Breathe. Go down. On purpose.